Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Victor Hugo relates the tragic story of Valjean’s early life:

Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned to read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became a tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a contraction of _voilà_ Jean, "here's Jean."  Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole, however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean was a sister older than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys and girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a husband she lodged and fed her young brother.  The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old. The youngest, one.  Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.  He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word. His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from his bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the heart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children. As he went on eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane, a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not punished.  In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work. The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!  One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.  This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world, he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler, smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.  Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the galleys. . . . Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place. He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a smoking roof, of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime, to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years. In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years. Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.  Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gaux had stolen a loaf; Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.  Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.  What had taken place in that soul? [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Second – The Fall, Chapter VI, “Jean Valjean”.]

Hugo relates Javert’s story, more briefly.

Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an inspector. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Fifth – The Descent Begins, Chapter V, ”Vague Flashes on the Horizon”.]

About Scrooge, from A Christmas Carol:

"These are but shadows of the things that have been," said the Ghost. "They have no consciousness of us."  The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past! Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for their several homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?  "The school is not quite deserted," said the Ghost. "A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still."  Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed. . . . They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.  Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears. [Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave II: The First of the Three Spirits.]

Patrice Nganang, from Cameroon, has written a trilogy of novels about national identity.

• Mount Pleasant: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016): “. . . Nganang brought to life Sultan Njoya’s Palace of Dreams, a magical court of artists and visionaries that fell prey to the colonial turf wars that carved up the country in the years leading to World War I.”
• When the Plums Are Ripe: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), “celebrated the unsung Cameroonian soldiers who fought alongside the Allies in World War II.”
• A Trail of Crab Tracks: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), “explores the birth of independent Cameroon in the 1960s and its subsequent descent into civil war.”

Stieg Larsson’s trilogy about a young woman with a brutal past:

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Knopf, 2008), “offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women.”
• The Girl Who Played with Fire (Knopf, 2009): “This time she is less detective than quarry, as she becomes the chief suspect in three murders. Hunted by the police and enemies from her past, she goes underground, while Blomkvist, one of the few people to believe in her innocence, races to find her and clues to the real killer.”
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Knopf, 2010): “Together, Blomkvist and Salander use their wiles and skills to take on corporate corruptos, government sleazes and sex criminals, not to mention these miscreants’ attendant hired goons.”

Other authors:

• Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel (1941): “The tragedy here is not what ultimately befalls Daniels, but how a single interaction with the police causes him to profoundly question his own identity.”
• Ken Follett, World Without End: A Novel (Dutton Adult, 2007): “. . . the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice.”
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001): “The very first page devotes a full paragraph to overextending the metaphor of an ''alarm bell of anxiety'' ringing in a suburban house, in a community heavy-handedly called St. Jude. Then, when a septuagenarian Parkinson's sufferer named Alfred Lambert goes into demented exile in that house's basement, Franzen set off my alarm bell of anxiety by warning that some larger significance might be about to hit me over the head . . .”
• Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972): “The characters are all refugees from the European holocaust who have emerged from their history half‐crazed and possessed. For them the dybbuks of an earlier time have been transformed into demons of modern paranoia.”
• John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road: A Novel (Knopf, 1998): “The effects of random violence, grief and loss on the human psyche are endlessly interesting . . .”
• Patricio Pron, My Father’s Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013): a man born in the 1970s tries to understand his father’s life and sudden disappearance amid Argentine politics.
• Donna Tartt, The Secret History: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), about young adults who are so determined to depart from their past that they all but destroy themselves.
• Tara French, The Witch Elm: A Novel (Viking, 2018): “Stately, 200 years old and burned into the collective memory of the Hennessys, this tree embodies the family’s idea of stability.”
• Daisy Johnson, Everything Under: A Novel (Graywolf Press, 2018): “Gretel, who works as a lexicographer updating dictionary entries, is haunted by the way her mother abandoned her when she was a teenager.”
• Jenny Erpenbeck, Go Went Gone: A Novel (Portobello Books, 2017), “dares to ask what becomes of identity and morality in the face of our globe’s radical changes.”
• Joseph Kertes, The Afterlife of Stars: A Novel (Little, Brown & Company, 2017): “The tragedy at the heart of the novel isn’t Paul Beck’s disappearance, nor is it Aunt Hermina’s disfigurement or the family’s other less visible scars. It’s the fact that, though the war might be over and the Hungarian revolution finished as quickly as it started, the survivors of those events are just beginning to feel their aftereffects.”
• Jean Toomer, Cane: A Novel (1923): “In 1923, Jean Toomer — highborn but an orphan and a drifter, a young man with secrets — published the single, slender novel upon which his reputation rests. In bursts of poetry and prose, ‘Cane’ tells of black life in the lethal rural South and in the loveless cities of the North.”
• Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019): “So is this an apocalyptic tale of women surviving in a world that has turned strange and cruel? Perhaps more a tale of patriarchal family structures taken to an extreme — the father as both predator and god, the mother a collaborator who occasionally protects, all three daughters hovering in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions and future concubines for the patriarch.”
• Linn Ullmann, Unquiet: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2019): “. . . though her six novels differ radically, consider that she is often charged, vaguely, even approvingly, but to my mind lazily, and therefore condescendingly, with being an inheritor of her father’s cinematic themes, tendencies and preoccupations. ”
• Eleanor Henderson, The Twelve-Mile Straight: A Novel (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2017): A racist murder and the legacy of Jim Crow haunt generations of a family. “kk . . .”
• Tommy Orange, There There: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018): “In Tommy Orange’s ‘There There,’ an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters.”
• Colm Tolbin, House of Names: A Novel (Scribner, 2017): “. . . But Toibin has bigger themes in mind too, particularly the cycle of violence that appears to trap the family of Agamemnon. The Greeks themselves often claimed that his whole line had been under a curse from the very moment that its progenitor had committed sacrilege by trying to serve the gods human flesh for dinner (human sacrifice ran in the family). Toibin offers an even less comfortable version rooted in a different kind of inheritance, as throughout the book we see the characters learning to step into (or failing to step out of) the terrible roles their parents once filled.”
• David Dyer, The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), is based on the squandered opportunity for a rescue at sea.
• Meghan Kenny, The Driest Season: A Novel (Norton, 2018): “This . . . quiet but satisfying novel about a long, hard summer expands her original raw, exquisite portrait of a girl in crisis into a broader examination of American adolescent anxiety and grief, contextualized by devastating global conflict.”
• Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World: Stories (Penguin Press, 2017): “Moshfegh’s dark, confident, prickling stories are mostly about youngish men and women not so far out of college. . . . They’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere and find themselves hunkering down in nowhere towns, dismal cabins, shabby apartments. Often they are recently divorced or separated. They have little money and no support systems. They are in flight from, or feuding with, parents and siblings.”
• Chia-Chia Lin, The Unpassing: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “A theme so timeless as to suggest a certain stolid permanence, this vagueness of home inspires even as it eludes members of a single household, creating a familiar world within an unfamiliar land, a country that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The challenge for the narrator (and, to a certain extent, the reader) becomes how to reconcile the static ‘unpassing’ of memories and identities, despite the exposure of time.”
• Ann Patchett, The Dutch House: A Novel (Harper, 2019): “. . . their father’s friend, Andrea, is going to end up, yes, as Danny and Maeve’s evil stepmother. She even comes equipped with two girls, Norma and Bright, who will become stepsisters to Danny and Maeve — although it turns out that they are sweet girls under their mother’s unkind sway.”
• Cathleen Schine, The Grammarians: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “. . . at the novel’s heart lies a profound philosophical question about the nature of the self, as Daphne and Laurel struggle to figure out who they are on their own and in relation to each other.”
• Meng Jin, Little Gods: A Novel (Custom House, 2020): “For a Successful Chinese Woman, Can Motherhood Be Her Undoing?”
• Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light (Henry Holt and Company, 2020): “It is a novel of late middle age, a novel of preserving what one has seized — of fighting off young, hungry men who remind you of yourself, who will use your own methods against you. Above all, it is a novel of living with the dead.”
• Maisy Card, Those Ghosts are Family: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2020): “For 30 Years, He Assumed the Identity of His Dead Friend. Now He’s Coming Clean.”
• Danielle Trussoni, The Ancestor: A Novel (Morrow/HarperCollins, 2020): “A heroine of mysterious heritage is whisked off to a remote mountainous region of Italy where she is held captive in a castle with twisting corridors, ancestral portraits and a mysterious woman kept in a secret room. There, she must face perils and hardships to uncover long-buried family secrets and find her own identity.”
• Jakob Guanzon, Abundance: A Novel (Graywolf Press, 2021): “Throughout, we see glimpses of Henry’s past that explain his present: inherited medical debt, a five-year prison sentence for selling opioids that makes job prospects slim, the departure of Junior’s drug-addicted mother.”
• Lauren Fox, Send for Me: A Novel (Knopf, 2021): “Inspired by Holocaust-Era Letters, a Novelist Examines Inherited Trauma”.
• Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello: Fiction (Henry Holt & Co., 2021): “Not only do we join along as Johnson’s characters journey to Monticello — Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia — but we also bear witness as they rifle through and reclaim what remains in that fraught, abandoned place, refashioning its legacy to their own liking.”  x
• Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half: A Novel (Riverhead, 2020): “Explores the Power and Performance of Race”.
• Jo Nesbo, The Kingdom: A Novel (Knopf, 2020): “If there’s a subtext here, it’s the narrowness and meanness of life in a small Nordic town, where everyone knows everyone’s secrets, or wants to, and where the past is never past and old animosities linger for generations.”
• Paulo Scott, Phenotypes: A Novel (And Other Books, 2022): “. . . a rather brisk novel that punctures the country’s fantasy of being a post-racial state and leaves readers scrambling for a sense of closure that it cannot possibly provide”.
• Megan Mayhew Bergman, How Strange a Season: Fiction (Scribner, 2022): “. . . a collection of horror stories couched in the glittering worlds of privilege: Lifestyles of the Rich, Permanently Damaged and Totally Despicable. The women who haunt these pages — former beauties, former athletes, formerly full of potential — have been kneecapped by the patriarchy.”
• Tyrell Johnson, The Lost Kings: A Novel (Anchor, 2022): “. . . a woman investigates both a bloody crime and its long aftereffects on her own body and psyche.”
• August Strindberg, “Miss Julie” (“Countess Julie”) (1888), a naturalistic tragedy in which a young woman has wanton sex with a house valet, realizes that her passion was driven by unhealthy relationships with her parents, and commits suicide.
• Joanna Quinn, The Whalebone Theatre: A Novel (Knopf, 2022), “breathlessly follows a trio of British youngsters from frolics on the beach to service and spycraft.”
• Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing: A Novel (Vintage, 2022): “. . . a woman discovers her husband’s mother is even more bothersome dead than alive.”
• Namwali Serpell, The Furrows: An Elegy (Hogarth, 2022): “. . . a childhood tragedy brings a lifetime of strange encounters.”
• Allegra Goodman, Sam: A Novel (The Dial Press, 2023): “. . . a portrait of a girl at risk that shimmers with an unusual intimacy and depth.”
• DéLana R.A. Dameron, Redwood Court: A Novel (The Dial Press, 2024): “Early in the story, Mika, Dameron’s young protagonist, wonders, ‘What am I made of?’ Assigned a school report on emigration and the origins of her own family, she grapples with an elemental truth of American life: Many Southern Black families like hers may never know the exact provenance of enslaved ancestors who were brought forcibly from distant shores.”
• Teju Cole, Tremor: A Novel (Random House, 2023) “uses images and artifacts to look deeply into trauma, identity and consolation.”
• Andrew Boryga, Victim: A Novel (Doubleday, 2024): “There’s real value in being a victim. Serious profit in pity, but only so long as you don’t become too ambitious, too greedy or too arrogant. Veer too far, and you run the risk of becoming dependent on disaster.”

Poetry

IDENTITY:

• Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
• Langston Hughes, “Negro”
• Ted Hughes, “Lovesong”
• Maya Angelou, “Men”
• Edgar Lee Masters, “Aner Clute”
• Edgar Lee Masters, “Archibald Higbie”
• Edgar Lee Masters, “Ernest Hyde”

Two poetry collections by Jenny Xie: “The title of Jenny Xie’s second collection of poetry, ‘The Rupture Tense,’ announces her lover’s quarrel with all our continuous pasts, presents and futures. Born in Hefei, China, Xie entered the rupture tense at age 4, when she immigrated to the United States and began to learn English in, of all places, Piscataway, N.J. Many years later, a melancholy sense of exile from the present continued to haunt Xie in her first book of poetry, ‘Eye Level’ (2018), in which she ruefully observed: ‘the present tense gets close, but doesn’t enter me.’ This chronic sense of untimeliness may be traced to the generational upheavals of the global Asian diaspora . . .”

• Eye Level: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2018)
• The Rupture Tense: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2022)

Other books of poems on identity:

• Taylor Johnson, Inheritance (Alice James, 2020): “Johnson writes about longing and 'impossible desire,' about poverty and precarity”

LIFE EXPERIENCES:

• Walt Whitman, “There Was a Child Went Forth”

Books of poems on Past Life Experiences:

• Reginald Dwayne Betts, Felon: Poems (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020): “A Poet and Ex-Con Writes About Life After Prison”

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

“Venison, asparagus, eleven thousand virgins. . . Who would have thought that these apparently un-symphonic items would have their special place in the best loved and most frequently played of Mahler’s symphonies? The Fourth is ‘about’ childhood, in the sense that most of his music seems to be 'about' profound issues of life and death.” Drawn consciously from his experiences, Gustav Mahler’s music is intensely personal. His adoration of his wife Alma is a recurrent theme in his symphonies and songs, and his own terminal heart condition is a prominent theme in his Sixth Symphony. Mahler’s childhood was difficult. He saw seven siblings die at an early age. His mother repeatedly forgave an abusive husband. Yet Mahler became a successful composer, who married a much sought-after woman he adored. Mahler was also a man who was capable of feeling deeply; in fact, he could not help himself. We hear all of this in his Symphony No. 4 in G Major (1900) (approx. 57-64’). Great recorded performances were conducted by Mengelberg in 1939, Walter in 1945, Kubelik in 1957, Kletzki in 1957, Reiner in 1958, Bernstein in 1960, Klemperer in 1961, Britten in 1961, Barbirolli in 1967, Szell in 1967, Horenstein in 1970, Maazel in 1983, Boulez in 1999, Gatti in 1999, Zander in 2001, Tilson Thomas in 2004, and Roth in 2022..

• The symphony opens with the sound of sleigh bells (1:00), a sound Mahler surely heard in his childhood, and then a romantic theme is explored. The theme begins to spin out of control (5:16), then this first movement (Bedachig. Nicht eilen.) turns aggressive, with sounds that would surely frighten a child (6:31 and 7:15, for example). Before that, Zander maintains, Mahler intends the sleigh bells and the strings to diverge in their tempi, with the clarinets slowing down to introduce the strings as the sleigh bells maintain their tempo: many conductors, including Bernstein (4:52) do not observe this but Zander argues that Mahler intended it to announce our entry into a world of uncontrolled forces that are often out of sync. Repeatedly, ideas are cut off abruptly by contrasting ideas (0:00, 2:15, 4:36 and 5:13); yet everyone seems thoroughly satisfied at the end of the movement. As Zander puts it, the music shifts from exuberance to catastrophe without warning. This first movement seems to reflect Mahler’s childhood traumas and their resulting anxieties, coupled with a sense of excitement in a curious and eager soul who simply could not help himself from enjoying life to the fullest and yet wanting more.
• In this second movement (In gemächlicher Bewegung. Ohne Hast), Mahler wastes no time introducing the scherzo, with a deliberately contorted sound in the solo violin (0:20) and the typical scherzo rhythm (0:46). Mahler flirts with dance but the dance is dark (1:11), suggesting death. As it often does, the violin represents death or the devil. As in the other movements, the mood shifts from light to dark, and back again, without warning (1:45 - 2:54 - 3:40 - 4:05 - 4:42 - 6:36). The solo violin reminds us that disaster awaits at any moment (8:45). This appears to be the primary musical idea: life offers no guarantees and can turn toward us or on us in an instant.
• The third movement (Ruhevoll {Poco Adagio}) begins in sweeping romanticism.  Buddhists say that such things lead to attachment; sure enough, sadness colors the romanticism (0:55), and then romanticism turns to despair (2;14). The music then returns to the initial theme (3:36), and new variations are tried out (4:18, for example), only to meet again with tragedy (4:44 and 5:52). Life and love are serious matters, Mahler tells us. As this movement continues, the symphonic tone becomes more assured. Finally, the orchestra announces the opening of heaven’s gates (4:12) and the flutes and clarinets (6:42) join the strings gently to usher the child, as Zander puts it, into “such a life as we would wish for every child right here on Earth.” That blissful life is what the final movement is to be about.
• In this final movement (Sehr behaglich) the singer brings forth images of abundance: foods of every kind, being enjoyed as though we were in Paradise (0:36). Yet these images are interspersed with blaring trumpets (2:03 and 3:03), perverse woodwinds (2:10 and 3:12) and barely controlled strings (3:50). In the end, the chaos, and joy, fall away into silence (beginning at 4:51 and again at 7:44). Mahler has presented life in its fullness and in its deprivations and want, and in so doing has captured the vagaries of life. 

Roberto Gerhard lived in “self-imposed exile” after Franco took power in Spain in 1939. His music referenced this background throughout his career. “. . . Gerhard introduces allusions to Catalan folk music as a way of humanising his bleak landscape . . .” He “developed a wholly individual musical language that drew equally from serial techniques, traditional tonal syntax, and the powerful Spanish tradition into which he was born.” His music portrays a world fraught with peril – not calamitous events, and not entirely dark music, but only music that suggests how he saw life.

• Symphony “Homenaje a Pedrell” (1941) (approx. 36’): “. . . there is a brilliance in the orchestration and a dark, eerie use of Spanish rhythms and folksongs . . .”
• Pandora Suite (from the ballet composed in 1945) (approx. 27-30’): “Both Don Quixote and Pandora were written against the background not only of Franco’s regime, but also of the Second World War. Pandora is a rejection of war . . .”
• The Duenna (1947) (approx. 136’), is an opera in which the composer “mingled . . . sprightly comic opera elements and Spanish rhythms with atonality. . . .”
• Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1951) (approx. 25’): “Serialization of pitch is often used to prevent anyone pitch from having dominance over another.”
• Symphony No. 1 (1953) (approx. 37-39’), “. . . is dedicated to the composer's wife . . .”
• Concerto for Harpsichord, String Orchestra & Percussion (1956) (approx. 22’), offers “an evocative tapestry of sound that mingles the night music of Bartók with memories of the Spanish Romantic Nationalists as seen through the expressionism of the Second Viennese School.”
• Symphony No. 2 (1959) (approx. 31’), was “dedicated to the memory of the Catalan music patron Rafael Paxtot i Jubert.”
• Symphony No. 3, “Collages” (for orchestra and tape) (1960) (approx. 20’), “encompasses the span of one day from dawn to the dead of night and is cast in seven continuous sections which contrast in design, texture, tempo and mood.” “Gerhard pointed to his experience of an airplane flight from America and seeing the sun rise at 30,000 feet as the initiation of his inspiration for the piece.”
• The Plague, cantata for narrator, chorus and orchestra, after Camus (1964) (approx. 46’), is “based on the novella by Albert Camus in an English translation by Stuart Gilbert. The story is of the outbreak of plague in the town of Oran in the 1940s. It arrives, it strikes terror, it kills and it departs. It may return again. As conductor Dorati has said: 'The plague is all diseases of the mind, every dictatorship, every war, and there is no real freedom as long as there are pestilences. The rats may come again to the happy city. This is the message.'”
• Epithalamion, for orchestra (1966) (approx. 20’): “The manuscript quotes Psalm 18 'In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber (and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race).'”
• Symphony No. 4, “New York” (1967) (approx. 26-27’): “Its various sections display the composer’s typical alternations of feverish activity and ‘Zen-like stasis’ – to quote Paul Conway’s notes. Gerhard himself described the static passages as 'action in very slow motion … the magic sense of uneventfulness'.” 

Several composers have written an opera based on August Strindberg’s play, “Miss Julie” (see the fiction section), including:

• Joseph Phibbs, Juliana (2022) (approx. 79’)
• William Alwyn, Miss Julie (1977) (approx. 118’)
• Ned Rorem, Miss Julie (1965) (approx. 111’) 

Other works:

• Bedřich Smetana, The Bartered Bride (Prodaná nevěsta) (1866) (approx. 117-159’) (libretto) “tells the story of how, after a late surprise revelation, true love prevails over the combined efforts of ambitious parents and a scheming marriage broker.” Here are links to a 1966 film version conducted by Kašlik, and a 1957 film version sung in English. Top audio-recorded performances feature Marenka, Cervinková & Kalas (Ancerl) in 1947; Musilová, Žídek & Kalas (Vogel) in 1952; Beňačková, Dvorský & Novák (Košler) in 1981; and Burešova, Juhás & Benci (Belohlávek) in 2012.
• James Willey, String Quartet No. 3 (1981) (approx. 16’): per the composer, this music evokes feelings of how the past can haunt the present.
• Sergei Rachmaninoff, The Bells (Kolokola), Op. 35 (1913) (37-43’), is the composer’s symphonic ode to Russia’s ubiquitous bells, based on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem. The composer “spent much of his childhood and youth in the Russian countryside. For the rest of his life, he would vividly remember a childhood resonating with the beautiful and exotic sounds of ringing bells.” A young admirer had sent Poe’s poem to Rachmaninoff, who explained: “The sound of church bells dominated all the cities of the Russia I used to know—Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow. They accompanied every Russian from childhood to grave, and no composer could escape their influence. . . In the drowsy quiet of a Roman afternoon, with Poe’s verses before me, I heard the bell voices, and tried to set down on paper their lovely tones that seemed to express the varying shades of human experience.” Top recorded performances are by Armstrong, Tear, Shirley-Quirk, London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus (Previn) in 1976; The State Academic Symphony Orchestra & Chorus (Svetlanov) in 1978; Fleming, Dent, Ledbetter, Atlantic Symphony Orchestra & Chorus (Shaw) in 1995; Orgonášová, Popov, Petrenko & Berlin Philharmoniker (Rattle) in 2012; and Chor und Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Jansons) in 2018.
• In his String Quartet No. 14 in F-sharp Major, Op. 142 (1973) (approx. 25-28’), Dmitri Shostakovich drew on memories from his youth – some pleasant, some unpleasant.
• Kurt Weill, Johnny Johnson (1936) (approx. 52’): how the war ruins Johnny.
• Carl Czerny, Romantic Fantasy No. 4, on Sir Walter Scott's "Rob Roy", Op. 243 (approx. 19’) – a main theme is national identity.
• Jeanine Tesori, Blue (2016) (approx. 122’) is a contemporary opera exploring race, police violence and identity.
• Krystal Grant Folkestad, Rivers I Have Walked (approx. 8’)
• Isang Yun, Violin Concerto No. 3 (1992) (approx. 30’): the violin “ imitates Korean string instruments, haegeum or komungo . . .” 

Few things influence personality development more than family of origin. We can often see this in music, as it is passed from generation to generation. Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Touré was known at the “King of the desert blues”. He was an important player in bringing this style of African music to the world. He created many albums, and left a substantial playlist. Known as “the Hendrix of the Sahara”, Vieux Farka Touré is Ali Farka Touré’s son. He gives a softer, more nearly urban edge to his father’s desert blues. Yet the core remains. He is distinctly Malian, and Touré. He too is building an impressive playlist. 

“Benedicte Maurseth is a Norwegian folk musician, composer and writer. She started playing the Hardanger fiddle at eight years old with Knut Hamre, and has traditional music from Hardanger as her specialty.” Here is a link to her playlist.

Matana Roberts, is creating an album series drawn from her background as a woman of African descent from the American south. It is “a multi-chapter work that combines conceptual scoring (graphic notation, 'chance' strategies), storytelling and historical narrative, performative theatre (personae, costume, multi-media), and a deeply considered channeling of personal ancestry and the 'universal' experience of Africans in America.”

• “Coin Coin Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres” (2011) (61’): “In the way the album moves between musical styles and in Roberts’s lyrical themes, COIN COIN gives eloquent voice to the fractured nature of identity, the way conflicting identifications jostle for prominence in our psyches, the multiple consciousness of modern hybridity.”
• “Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile” (2013) (49’) “focuses on the life of Roberts’ grandmother, a poor Southern girl who grew up in an era of keen turbulence that spanned the Great Depression, World War II, and America’s crawl toward civil rights.”
• “Coin Coin Chapter Three: River Run Thee” (2015) (46’): “Ranging from mystic drone to explosive free jazz, Roberts digs into the dirt along the spiritual roots of American blues, jazz, rock and more on the album; she threads it through the pain, struggle, and beauty of African-American experience, of American experience and of her own experience.” “Roberts . . . pulls across generations and geographies, so that the confessions of a slave-trader neighbor the convictions of Malcolm X and the sound of a lonely saxophone telling the news of the blues tangles with the screech of a subway car and a newborn baby crying.”
• “Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis” (2019) (47’) “focuses more tightly on myth-making by channeling the protagonist in a broadly narrative form. We learn of her father, of her grandmother, of her prayers for safety, and watch Roberts narrate as a vessel for her spiritspeak.”
• “Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden” (2023) (58’) tells “the story of an ancestor of Roberts’ death from an illegal abortion, and becomes a kind of historical unpacking of this event, a character study for a character who, in establishment histories, would only be encountered as a statistic.”

Other albums:

• Airto Moreira, “Identity” (2015) (37’)
• Pete Rodriguez, “Obstacles” (2021) (61’): “In the time-honored fashion of turning life’s struggles into art, Obstacles reminds us that sometimes our fraught experiences can provide the best inspirations.”
• Alex Roth & Cut the Sky, “Esz Kodesz” (2023) (39’) “finds the guitarist and composer audio-mapping regional histories and navigating personal reconnections as he meditates on his own East European heritage and awakened sense of identity.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Simon & Garfunkel “My Little Town” (lyrics)
• Bowling for Soup, “1985” (lyrics)

Visual Arts

• Giorgio de Chirico, Furniture and Rocks in a Room (1973)
• Max Beckman, Beginning (1949)
• Salvador Dali, Phantasmagoria (ca. 1930)
• Paul Klee, A Young Lady's Adventure (1921)
• Jan Brueghel the Elder, Orpheus in the Underworld (1594)

Film and Stage

• Shakespeare in Love: a romantic fantasy about how the love of Shakespeare’s life eluded him but inspired his genius
• Toto the Hero: an epically comictreatment of a life seemingly destined for mediocrity; the absurd musical interlude scene is quirky and unforgettable
• Eat Drink Man Woman (Yin Shi Nan Nu) an “edible treat” of a filmabout “three beautiful daughters whose romantic lives are star-crossed and who can't seem to escape their father's spell”
• Enemies, A Love Story: This emotionally complicated story is hard to categorize but the best clue is Isaac Bashavis Singer’s background and interests. His novel and this film are most accurately seen as reflections of that past.
• Germany, Year Zero (Germany, Anno Zero): a young boy in post-World-War-II Germany is influenced by a relative who remains committed to Nazi ideals
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neil’s dismal viewof his family of origin
• My Own Private Idaho, about two hustlers from different backgrounds
• The Scarlet Empress: a fictional version of Catherine the Great’s life
• Affliction, a film about a toxic family history
• Out of the Past, “one of the greatest of all film noirs”
• Ponette: a four-year-old girl copes with her mother’s death
• Psycho(1960): illustrating the value of a good mother, the film taps directly into our fears
• Spellbound: surrealist treatment of a dark past
• Black Narcissus, an artistic version of “can’t live with it, can’t live without it,” about nuns escaping unhappy experiencesin the Himalayas
• The Public Enemy, a 1930s view of the effects of bad influences
• Love & Mercy, a dramatization of Brian Wilson’s (Beach Boys founder) life, which focuses on his mental illness, an abusive father and an unscrupulous psychiatrist
• Peeping Tom, a “controversial meditation on violence and voyeurism,” in which a psychologist’s filming of his son’s early yearsproduces gruesome consequences
• Passing Strange: an “impressionable wanderer” tries to come to terms with his background
• The Serpent’s Egg: What is a human being, and how much hope is there for us?
• Miss Julie, a 1951 film, after August Strindberg’s play

Based on Stieg Larsson’s trilogy of novels about a resilient young woman with a physically and psychologically brutal past:

• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• The Girl Who Played with Fire
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest